"Even
as he sits helpless in his wheelchair, his mind seems to soar ever more
brilliantly across the vastness of space and time to unlock the secrets of the
universe." - Time

"Brilliant book!" - Nick Donaldson, Bit Wrangler Extraordinaire!.

This book was the first of
Hawking's that I read, and still my favourite. If you haven't read it yet, I
heartily recommend it. Below is the flap cover text from the hardback:Stephen
W. Hawking has achieved international prominence as one of the great minds of
the twentieth century. Now, for the first time, he has written a popular work
exploring the outer limits of our knowledge of astrophysics and the nature of
time and the universe.

Bantam Books, April 1988
ISBN: 0-553-05340-X

The result is a truly enlightening book: a classic introduction to today's most
important scientific ideas about the cosmos, and a unique opportunity to
experience the intellect of one of the most imaginative, influential thinkers of
our age.

From the vantage point of the wheelchair where he has spent the last twenty
years trapped by Lou Gehrig's disease, Professor Hawking himself has transformed
our view of the universe. His groundbreaking research into black holes offers
clues to that elusive moment when the universe was born. Now, in the incisive
style which is his trademark, Professor Hawking shows us how mankind's "world
picture" has evolved from the time of Aristotle through the 1915
breakthrough of Albert Einstein, to the exciting ideas of today's prominent
young physicists.

Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end? Is the universe infinite?
or does it have boundaries? With these fundamental questions in mind, Hawking
reviews the great theories of the cosmos -- and all the puzzles, paradoxes and
contradictions still unresolved. With great care he explains Galileo's and
Newton's discoveries. Next he takes us step-by-step throught Einstein's general
theory of relativity (which concerns the extraordinarily vast) and then moves on
to the other great theory of our century, quantum mechanics (which concerns the
extraordinarily tiny). And last, he expores the worldwide effort to combin the
two into a single quantum theory of gravity, the unified theory, which should
resolve all the mysteries left unsolved -- and he tells why he believes that
momentous discovery is not far off.

Professor Hawking also travels into the exotic realms of deep space, distant
galaxies, black holes, quarks, GUTs, particles with "flavors" and "spin,
" antimatter, the "arrows of time" -- and intrigues us with their
unexpected implications. He reveals the unsettling possibilities of time
running backward when an expanding universe collapses, a universe with as many
as eleven dimensions, a theory of a "no boundary" universe that may
replace the big bang theory and a God who may be increasingly fenced in by the
new discoveries -- who may be the prime mover in the creation of it all.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME is a landmark book written for those of us who
prefer words to equations. Told by an extraordinary contributor to the ideas of
humankind, this is the story of the ultimate quest for knowledge, the ongoing
search for the secrets at the heart of time and space.